In the Shadow of the Glacier (11 page)

Indecision moved behind her lovely dark eyes.

He didn’t give her time to make up her mind. “We’ll make a super team. Now tell me, who’s the best person to talk to about this Commemorative Peace Garden?”

“Lucky Smith probably.”

“Can you set up an interview with him?”

“Lucky’s a woman.”

“Even better. Give Lucky a call. I guarantee she’ll be pleased to tell her side of the story to the audience of CNC. Early this evening would be good. My cameraman’ll be here by then. Tell her that I’ll have a photographer, women love that.”

“I can talk to her, sure, but there might be a problem.”

“Come on, Meredith, you’re a journalist. Explain to this Lucky woman how important it is that America understands what she’s trying to achieve here.”

“It’s not that, Rich. It’s just that Lucky’s daughter, Molly, found the body.”

“How horrible for her. She needs an outlet for her stress. We’ll interview her along with the mother. Play up the shock of discovering the deceased to add a human interest angle.”

“That’s not it. Molly’s a cop. I thought she was just a beat cop, but she’s assisting the sergeant in charge of the investigation. I went to high school with Molly. I’m pretty sure she’ll tell her mom not to talk to anyone.”

If Rich Ashcroft believed in God, he would have fallen to his knees in the parking lot behind
Trafalgar Daily Gazette
and raised his hands in thanks.

□□□

“Kootenay Boundary Regional Hospital in Trail. The autopsy’s scheduled for noon. We should just make it, which will put us in Dr. Lee’s good books. She hates being left waiting.” Winters leaned against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Wake me when we get there.”

Communities in this part of the province were small, with long stretches of undeveloped land between them. Trail was about an hour from Trafalgar but less than half-an-hour from the border with Washington State. Smith had driven down this road many times. Lucky, Samwise, and Moonlight visited family in the States. They never visited Andy’s side of the family, and he didn’t often come with them. When Smith was fourteen, her parental grandfather, whom she had never met, died. After that her grandmother traveled to Trafalgar every second Christmas, and sometimes Andy’s sisters and their families came with her. No one ever spoke about the old man, and his years of bitterness at the son who’d abandoned not only his country but the legacy of generations of a proud military family.

The sky was blue, and the temperature indicator in the van already read twenty-nine degrees Celsius. She switched on the car’s air conditioning. American tourists sometimes ran into difficulties with the change in the temperature scale as they crossed the border, thinking that twenty-nine degrees meant scarves and mittens, rather than the shorts and sunscreen required by the equivalent of eighty-five Fahrenheit.

Houses and property sporadically broke through the heavy pine forest stretching back from the road. She passed everything from tumble-down shacks to luxury mansions, sometimes less than a hundred yards apart. At the lights for the turnoff to Castlegar, a young woman, hair wrapped in a red scarf, heavy pack at her feet, stood on the other side of the intersection, her thumb out. She raised her eyebrows as the light turned green and the unmarked police van, the only car on the road, accelerated. There weren’t many places you saw hitchhikers these days, and certainly not women. Other than the Kootenays, that is.

It was five minutes to noon when they arrived at the hospital. Smith found a parking spot close to the entrance and switched off the engine. When she turned to wake up Winters, he was looking at her. There was no trace of sleep in his dark eyes or the muscles of his face.

“Here we are. Trail.”

“So I see. Thank you, Molly.”

Smith cursed herself for an idiot. Did she always have to point out the obvious? Of course they were in Trail. Winters must have been here hundreds of times.

They walked across the parking lot, heat rising from the asphalt. One of the advantages of being a woman is summer clothes—cropped pants, light cotton T-shirts, naked arms, barely there sandals, acceptable even at work. But now that she was a cop, Smith’s feet sweated in boots and thick socks, her pants clung to her legs, and her gunbelt dragged her down. She’d made the mistake of wearing a new bra, and beneath the Kevlar vest the underwire dug into tender skin. Winters, by contrast, was dressed comfortably in brown pants and a perfectly ironed cream shirt, open at the neck. The shirt wasn’t tucked in, and Smith knew that it concealed his gun and handcuffs.

The hospital was quiet on a pleasant Friday morning. Her boots were loud on the freshly polished floors.

“Have you attended an autopsy before, Molly?” Sergeant Winters asked, pushing through the door marked
No Entry
.

“No.” A flock of small birds searched for a place to nest in her stomach.

Dr. Lee was waiting for them. Her unbound hair fell in a sleek black waterfall. The too-large white lab coat covered her dress, and she held a Styrofoam coffee cup in her right hand.

“We’re ready to begin.” Lee turned, and her stiletto heels tapped like a marching band down the bright white corridor. She tossed her cup into a wastepaper basket without giving it a glance.

Smith swallowed.

“There’s no disgrace in being sick or feeling faint. Leave if you have to,” Winters said. He pulled a small tube out of his pocket and rubbed it above his upper lip. He held it out. “Menthol. Kills some of the smell. This body isn’t old, so it shouldn’t be too bad, but it’s never pleasant. Take it.”

Smith took it. She smiled at Sergeant Winters.
Deep calming breaths
, she said to herself, applying the balm.
Take deep calming breaths.
This couldn’t be any worse than the guy who flew off his motorcycle and hit the side of the mountain head first going a hundred kilometers an hour. After having a lot to drink and telling his buddies that only pussies wore helmets.

They followed Lee through the swinging doors.

The room was filled with white light, like someone’s idea of heaven’s waiting room. However, unlike what Smith might hope to find in the heavenly vestibule, a slab of meat that had once been a human being lay on the table in the center of the room. He was naked, and in the indignity of death and the lights of the morgue his skin was the pale blue of skim milk. His mouth gaped open. His belly was flabby, the muscles of his arms and legs shrunken to pinpricks, genitals withered to insignificance. The table he lay on wasn’t like any table Smith had ever seen. A gutter ran all around it. She tried not to think of what might be the purpose of the gutter.

A young man stood against the wall, beside an array of instruments that would have done a medieval torture chamber proud. He was almost as pale as Montgomery, and a scattering of whiskers on his chin struggled to make a goatee. He nodded greetings.

“Russ,” Winters said. Smith dared not say anything.

Dr. Lee walked to Montgomery’s head. She pulled an elastic band out of the pocket of her lab coat and, with one twist, bound her hair. Then she held out her hand, and Russ handed her a saw. “I’ve made a visual examination of the exterior of the body, and am now going to penetrate the skull.” The doctor held the instrument over Montgomery’s head. “If you think you are going to be sick, Constable Smith,” she said, “leave immediately.” The saw roared to life. “It messes up the chain of evidence if I have to pick an observer’s vomit out of the cadaver’s brains.”

Smith put both hands to her mouth and fled.

□□□

“That wasn’t nice, Doctor,” Winters said, once Lee had finished her task and they’d left Russ to clean up.

“Constable Smith?” the doctor said. “Next time, she’ll be better prepared. She’ll last a good five minutes before running out the door. And before you know it, she’ll be as cool as a cucumber, just like you.”

“There’s something to be said, Shirley, for people who vomit at the sight of violent death.”

“Not in our professions, John.”

“Probably not. Tell me what you think, before I fetch our embarrassed constable.”

“Killed by a series of blows to the back of the head. No doubt by the proverbial blunt instrument. I don’t see any traces of the instrument itself in the wound, which almost certainly rules out wood. Something metal, probably, and clean. Death was instantaneous or as good as. There are no wounds, other than to the head, that I can see. No defensive wounds, no sign of restraint—bruising around the wrists or ankles, for example. His last meal had been steak and potatoes and Caesar salad. Why men of your age persist in believing that a few leaves of lettuce, if they’re coated with high-fat dressing, sprinkled with chunks of bacon and deep-fried bread cubes, is at all healthy, I hesitate to guess. He’d eaten less than an hour before death.” Lee shrugged thin shoulders. “My report will be ready before the end of the day.”

“Thanks, doc.” What the hell did she mean by
men of your age
? First Tyler suggested that Winters should try the delights of Viagra and now Shirley Lee was lumping him in with the overweight Reginald Montgomery.

“Time of death?” he asked.

“Less than an hour before I got there. He was very fresh.”

Lee walked away without another word. Back to her strange world of the dead.

Winters went in search of his constable.

She was sitting on a bench by the front doors of the hospital. The smokers, some of them in wheelchairs, or taking in liquids through IVs, watched her from the corner of their eyes.

“Ready to go?”

Her eyes were dry, but tinged with red. She held her hat in her hands. Strands of pale hair had escaped from the braid and caressed her face. Despite the blue uniform, the badge and gun belt, she looked like a high school cheerleader who’d just found out that her boyfriend, the captain of the football team, had been making merry behind the stands with another girl.

An ambulance sped past, under full lights and sirens.

“We have work to do back in Trafalgar,” Winters said. “Let’s go.”

A woman edged toward them; her ears might well have been flapping. The details of her face were concealed in a camouflage of cigarette smoke.

“Can I help you, madam?” he asked.

“Just bein’ friendly,” she chuckled. Some of the smoke cleared, to reveal a face that was a hundred and twenty if it was a day.

Winters walked away, heading for the van. Smith would follow or not. And if not, he would be well enough rid of her.

Heavy boots fell into step behind him. “I thought I’d be ready for it. But I wasn’t. I’ll get used to it, soon.”

“Pray you don’t get too used to it, Molly. I want to drop in on Mrs. Tyler. Officers have been visiting the businesses backing onto the alley to ask what time they closed up last night, and if anyone saw anything out of the ordinary. I’m hoping that people in Trafalgar will be more accommodating to our enquires than they were in Vancouver.”

“You were involved in the Sanders case, I’ve heard,” she said, her voice and eyes filling with interest.

“The depths to which humans can fall,” he said, shaking off many memories. “Alleged, of course.”

“Of course. Do you want me to drive?”

The color was back in her face, and her shoulders were set and her back straight.

“I do.”

Winters’ phone rang as they settled into the car. He listened briefly, before hanging up with a thanks. “A wallet and cell phone matching the description of Montgomery’s were found in a flowerbed a couple of blocks from the site. There was no cash in the wallet, but lots of credit cards. They’re on the way to the lab for fingerprinting. Too bad, I was hoping our perp would use the cards or make a call.”

“The watch?”

“Still looking. That watch is valuable. Might be that he couldn’t bring himself to toss it. If he tries to sell it we’ll have a good lead—I’ve had the description circulated to pawn shops and second-hand jewelry stores all across the province.”

“Someone else might have picked it up.”

“That would be a complication we don’t need.”

□□□

“Hi, Lucky,” a voice said from the doorway. “I’m glad to find you in. Have you got a minute to chat?”

Lucky Smith glanced at her watch. Past two o’clock, and she’d missed lunch once again. The better the business did, the harder she had to work. She’d thought it would be the other way around. She pushed her glasses down her nose and rubbed her eyes. “Meredith. Hello. What can I do for you?”

Meredith’s face shone with excitement, and her black hair swung as if a strong wind was behind her. “I’d like you to meet my colleague, Rich Ashcroft.”

A man, too handsome by half, crossed the room and extended his hand. Lucky rose from her office chair. He was short, with a large head. Close to Lucky’s age, maybe a bit more, but the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth were stretched tight, the effects of surgery, perhaps. His hair was thick and black, and his perfectly straight teeth were a shade of white rarely found outside of a fashion magazine. Lucky shook his hand, and her skin shivered at the damp touch of his fingers. She sat back down.

“Rich is here to do a story about the peace garden,” Meredith said. She dragged a chair out of the corner and offered it to Ashcroft.

“A story?” Her interest caught, Lucky settled into her own chair. When the Commemorative Peace Garden had first been proposed, media attention had risen to a fevered pitch, to the surprise of everyone in town. Reporters from the national newspapers, even from the
New York Times
and Fox News, descended on town. But, as is the nature of media attention, they’d gone away as soon as something else captured their interest. The mayor had made it clear that he intended to approve the Peace Garden, and Lucky’s committee had collapsed with a contented sigh like the master of the house settling into his lounge chair after Christmas dinner.